Research overview: do cats learn by watching humans

Beyond learning from other cats, researchers have asked whether cats can copy or learn from human demonstrators. This overview surveys exploratory studies, including reports that cats can be trained to imitate human-demonstrated actions on cue and observations of cats acquiring behaviours after watching people, alongside the methodological caution such claims require. It discusses how the cat's individualistic learning style and weaker help-seeking complicate interspecific social learning compared with dogs. The topic examines an emerging and still thin evidence base on cross-species social learning in cats, and it frames promising directions for testing whether and how cats extract information from human behaviour.